This is a wild, beautiful, wonderful ride.

"Shining a laudatory spotlight on Carlson, Kelly and their ilk does their work for them, lending their reputations new legitimacy the next time they attack immigrants or promote authoritarians. Infighting among voices on the right is welcome, but it’s often best to let them fight amongst themselves"

I've been threatening to teach a course called "Living the Luddite Life" for several years now, and have slowly been seeding the idea in my chair's mind that he'll give me space for a typewriter lab...

The Inattention Economy Revealing the unheralded contributions of women of color to the foundation and development of the digital economyThe Inattention Economy challenges the wides...

Here's the link to the free pdf of my new book The Inattention Economy: How Women of Color Built the Internet. Access is so important and I'm grateful that the press is platforming it as one file that is easy to download. www.upress.umn.edu/978081669906...

When a writer you admire shouts you out… dawwwww (and pupppppy) 😳

This is a huge, new opening. Congratulations and Thank You.

An extraordinary interview.

The man who coined Metaverse now says Meta’s glasses are creepy Neil Stephenson has changed his mind about VR and AR.

In his 1992 novel Snow Crash, writer Neal Stephenson coined the phrase "Metaverse" to describe a VR world experienced through goggles.

Now, Stephenson says he no longer believes face-worn computing is the future: “People don’t like wearing things on their faces and don’t trust those who do.”

Lisa Messeri - ICI Berlin This talk explores scale and simulation. In the scientific context, simulations are often epistemic tools that can be larger or smaller or faster or slower than the target of study. But in cases where...

Tomorrow in Berlin, giving a talk! “1:1 - drawn to scale”. It was fun to think across space, VR, and AI to discuss simulations that strive for realism.

Unbelievable (in a totally believable way)

The first academic talk i ever gave (as a 2nd year grad student maybe?) was on the humor that resulted from Pluto being demoted from a planet to a dwarf planet.

oh no

i should add that to the 'learning outcomes' section of my syllabus.

I brought this article up during an "AI governance" meeting this morning at my university. Just an FYI, guys!!

I was so queasy reading this

who could have predicted! and it makes me so happy that this is the image that will forever be associated with metaverse.

i have an anthropology joke but it's culturally sensitive

the article hews mostly to the aesthics (even as it is explicit in declaring AI a tasteless technology). it's a short piece, and much more can be said, esp wrt the politics of taste the include and extend beyond Epstein to categories of superiority. all of which makes my stomach turn.

"the delusions of the Oligarchs... manifest as infrastructure, but will later [be] societal ruins. So, it might be easier to act now — to resist the data centre buildouts that usher in their worldviews — than to rebuild a society that has collapsed from a failed social experiment."

On "Ezra Klein", Jack Clark of Anthropic kept talking about "taste" as what they look for in hiring, now that Claude codes so well. When pressed, he defined "taste" as experience. In addition to the functions Chayka talks about, taste also seems to be a way to replace and diminish "expertise."

AI Surrogates and illusions of generalizability in cognitive science Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have generated enthusiasm for using AI simulations of human research participants to generate new know…

Totally. @mjcrockett.bsky.social and I do just this in a recent paper critiquing LLMs as human subjects in psych research. "we suggest that the appeal of [LLMs] reveals something important about present anxieties within cognitive science and how they might be resolved."

no... there are certain episodes of Black Mirror that now feel quaint.

Three frame comic. First frame, a woman heads into a house saying ‘I’m going to shut myself away and write a novel set in a horrific dystopia.’ Second woman says ‘good luck!’ Second frame: super title reads ‘five years later’ and author in her study exclaims ‘finished!’. Third frame, author emerges onto her doorstep clutching her manuscript only to see indications of a dystopia playing out in front of her. She exclaims ‘damn!’

Thinking about this 2018 cartoon by Tom Gauld for no reason whatsoever

Nice timing for @mjcrockett.bsky.social and my article on AI Surrogates and Illusions of Generalizability to be officially published. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

and making it seem like the moral responsibility of universities to use our time and labor to train students on a billion dollar tech companies product ... 🤢

What did we do to deserve Christian and Rick? It’s so good.

totally. It's the same blindness of "this LLM is terrible at the thing i'm an expert in but surprisingly good at the thing i know nothing about."

also, the post that launched 1000 responses was posted by an agentic Claude (based on the social media posts of the person running this agent - or however the hell we are referring to this current cluster-f). it all just makes me very sad and tired.

In writing about AI Surrogates for human subjects research, @mjcrockett.bsky.social and i realized that their appeal indexes disciplinary anxieties. Dave's post nicely details some of the broader (institutional) anxieties that promises of AI replacements are surfacing.
bsky.app/profile/lmes...

i know... we'll soon see how our first year PhD students have been impacted by this shift.